A spirited critique of what Russell Jacoby has called the “culture of endless talk,” of a piece with Jackson Lears’ Fables...
In war and its commercial counterpart, we have long lived inside a “culture of consultation.” So writes Nation contributing editor Featherstone (Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Worker's Rights at Wal-Mart, 2004, etc.) in this intriguing look at the rise of the focus group.
Focus groups, writes the author, afford “ordinary people” a chance to weigh in on all kinds of things, whether to gauge whether the president is doing a good job or a mix is easy enough to turn into a cake. Around the focus group evolved a parallel culture of social science–based “motivational research” firms, working the angles in an increasingly consumerist society, using advanced technology of the sort that we now see when the responses of focus groups are measured live on TV. Focus groups bent on persuading citizens to enter World War II revealed that the way to sell it was not to depict the Nazis as “horrible monsters,” which frightened citizens into wanting nothing to do with the war effort; instead, writes Featherstone, “American propaganda would emphasize our superior values: democracy and rationality.” After the war, psychologists and other social scientists used abstract methods to “acclimate patients to consumer capitalism,” shaping advertising to reflect the desire of consumers to buy endlessly. Along the way, Featherstone disassembles some misconceptions—the Edsel car, for instance, was not a failure because it relied too much on focus groups but perhaps because it made too little use of them (focus-group members, for example, expressed dislike for the very name, saying that it sounded too much like “weasel”). Nefarious use of the focus group continues, even though supposedly displaced by the internet, especially in political matters, about which the author observes, “when a focus group feels more like democracy than the real thing, we need to ask how well the real thing is functioning.”
A spirited critique of what Russell Jacoby has called the “culture of endless talk,” of a piece with Jackson Lears’ Fables of Abundance (1995) and Rachel Maines’ Hedonizing Technologies (2009).Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-944869-48-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: OR Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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